In six pages judicial review is considered from an historical perspective of its justification with the famous Marbury v. Madison case and the role played by Chief Justice John Marshall in justifying judicial review examined. Six sources are cited in the bibliography.
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The freedoms and privileges we enjoy in the United States are often attributed to the type of government which we have in place.
We pride ourselves on the fact that this government is devised and functions to have a system of checks and balances against the concentration of power within the state
and national governments (Tannahill and Bedichek, 1991). To provide for a system of checks and balances in the national government the framers divided the duties of the government into
three sections. The first section is the legislative division which is charged with making the laws, the second is the executive division which enforces the laws passed by the
legislative division and the third is the judicial division which interprets the laws passed by the legislative division and determines if they are legal according to the Constitution (Tannahill and
Bedichek, 1991). This system would become the equivalent of the Nations central nervous system. It would regulate just exactly what our government could and could not do.
The question over the origin and justification of one of these branches, however, has been hotly contested since our earliest history and even more so in recent times. That
branch is the judicial division, that division which oversees the actions of Congress itself. Judge Learned Hand is attributed as having said that
their is "nothing in the United States Constitution that gave courts any authority to review the decisions of Congress". Others in U.S. history, however, contend that judicial review is
necessary in order to preserve limited government in this country. In the Federalist 78, for example, Alexander Hamilton argued that judicial review was essential to maintaining limited government.